Cecil Day-Lewis | Penny's poetry pages Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia Edit Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland . He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (December 1872 - 19 April 1938) and Kathleen Squires. After Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford . Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as Anglo-Irish for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay.(Citation needed) He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford , from which he graduated in 1927. In 1928 he married Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne master (i.e. teacher), and worked as a schoolmaster in three schools.

[1] During the 1940s he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann . His second marriage was to actress Jill Balcon . Flirtation with Communism Edit In his youth Day-Lewis adopted communist views, becoming a member of the Communist party from 1935 to 1938, and his early poetry was marked by didacticism and a preoccupation with social themes. [2] In 1937 he edited The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution. In the introduction he supported a popular front against a "Capitalism that has no further use for culture". He explains that the title refers to Prometheus bound by his chains, quotes Shelly's preface to Prometheus Unbound and says the contributors believe that "the Promethean fire of enlightenment, which should be given for the benefit of mankind at large, is being used at present to stoke up the furnaces of private profit". The contributors were: Rex Warner, Edward Upward , Arthur Calder-Marshall, Barbara Nixon, Anthony Blunt , Alan Bush, Charles Madge , Alistair Brown, J. D. Bernal , T.A.Jackson and Edgell Rickword .

After the late 1930s he gradually became disillusioned with communism. [1] Among his works is his autobiography, Buried Day (1960), in which he renounces his communist views, [3] while his detective story The Sad Variety (1964) contains a scathing portrayal of doctrinaire communists, the repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and the ruthless tactics of Soviet intelligence agents. World War II and after Edit During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information , an institution satirised by George Orwell in his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four , but equally based on Orwell's experience of the BBC . After the war he joined the publisher Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor. In 1946 Day-Lewis was a lecturer at Cambridge University , publishing his lectures in The Poetic Image (1947). In 1951 he married the actress Jill Balcon , daughter of Michael Balcon . He later taught poetry at Oxford , where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951-1956.

[1] From 1962-1963 Day-Lewis was the Norton Professor at Harvard University . Day-Lewis's two marriages yielded four children, [4] including Academy Award -winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, food writer and journalist Tamasin Day-Lewis, and TV critic and writer Sean Day-Lewis, who wrote a biography of his father, C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980). Cecil Day-Lewis's gravestone, Stinsford, Dorset, UK, 2006. Photo by Caroline Tandy. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Geograph.org . Day-Lewis was chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature , an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters , a Member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a professor of rhetoric at Gresham College , London. Day-Lewis died from pancreatic cancer on 22 May 1972 in the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard , where he and his wife were staying.

He was a great admirer of Thomas Hardy , and he had arranged to be buried as close as possible to the author's grave in Stinsford churchyard. [1] His epitaph reads: "Shall I be gone long? / For ever and a day / To whom there belong? / Ask the stone to say / Ask my song" Writing Edit In Oxford, Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, appeared in 1925. [1] During the Second World War his work was now no longer so influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional style of lyricism . Some critics believe that he reached his full stature as a poet in Word Over All (1943), when he finally distanced himself from Auden.

[5] Nicholas Blake Edit In 1935, Day-Lewis decided to supplement his income from poetry by writing a detective novel , A Question of Proof, in which he created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective who, as the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard , has the same access to, and good relations with, official crime investigation bodies as those enjoyed by other fictional sleuths such as Ellery Queen , Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey . [6] This was followed by nineteen more crime novels. (In the first Nigel Strangeways novel, the detective is modeled on W.H. Auden , but Strangeways becomes a far less extravagant and more serious figure in later novels.) From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing. [1] Four of the Blake novels - A Tangled Web, Penknife In My Heart, The Deadly Joker, The Private Wound - do not feature Strangeways. Minute for Murder is set against the background of Day-Lewis's World War II experiences in the Ministry of Information.

Head of a Traveler features as a principal character a well-known poet, currently frustrated and blocked from writing, whose best poetic days are long behind him; the reader is free to speculate whether the author is describing himself, one of his colleagues, or has entirely invented the character. Recognition He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, in succession to John Masefield . Publications From Feathers to Iron. Hogarth, 1932. The Magnetic Mountain. Hogarth, 1933. Collected Poems, 1929-1933. Hogarth, 1935; 2nd edition, 1945. Collected Poems, 1929-1933 [&] A Hope For Poetry. Random House , 1935. A Time to Dance, and other poems. Hogarth, 1935. A Time to Dance; Noah and the Waters, [and] Revolution in Writing, Random House, 1936. Overtures to Death, and other poems. London: Cape , 1938. Poems in Wartime.

London: Cape, 1940. Selected Poems. Hogarth, 1940 revised edition, Penguin , 1969. Word Over All. London: Cape, 1943; Transatlantic, 1944. Short is the Time: Poems, 1936-1943 (previously published as Overtures to Death, and other poems and Word Over All). New York: Oxford University Press , 1945. Collected Poems, 1929-1936. Hogarth, 1948. Poems, 1943-1947. Oxford University Press, 1948. An Italian Visit ( narrative poem ). Harper , 1953. Collected Poems. London: Cape, 1954 published as Collected Poems, 1954, 1970. Pegasus, and other poems. London: Cape, 1957, Harper, 1958. The Newborn: D.M.B., 29th April, 1957.

Favil Press of Kensington, 1957. The Gate, and other poems. London: Cape, 1962. Requiem for the Living. Harper, 1964. On Not Saying Anything. privately printed, 1964. The Room, and other poems. London: Cape, 1965. A Marriage Song for Albert and Barbara. privately printed, 1965. Selected Poems. Harper, 1967 Selections from His Poetry (edited by Patric Dickinson). London: Chatto & Windus , 1967. The Abbey That Refused to Die: A poem. Ballintubber Abbey, 1967. The Whispering Roots, and other poems. Harper, 1970 published in UK as The Whispering Roots. London: Cape, 1970. The Poems of C. Day Lewis (edited by Ian Parson). London: Cape, 1970. Posthumous Poems (leather bound facsimiles), (introduction by Jill Balcon). Andoversford, England: Whittington Press, 1979.

The Complete Poems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press , 1992. Play Noah and the Waters (modern morality play). London: Hogarth, 1936. Novels The Friendly Tree. London: Cape, 1936; New York: Harper, 1937. Starting Point. London: Cape, 1937; New York: Harper, 1938. Child of Misfortune. London: Cape, 1939. As "Nicholas Blake" A Question of Proof. Harper, 1935. Shell of Death. Harper, 1936 ( published in England as Thou Shell of Death. Collins, 1936). There's Trouble Brewing. Harper, 1937. The Beast Must Die. Harper, 1938. The Smiler With the Knife. Harper, 1939. The Summer Camp Mystery. Harper, 1940 published in UK as Malice in Wonderland.

Collins, 1940 American paperback edition published as Malice with Murder The Corpse in the Snowman, Harper, 1941 published in England as The Case of the Abominable Snowman. Collins, 1941. Minute for Murder. Harper, 1947. Head of a Traveler. Harper, 1949. The Dreadful Hollow. Harper, 1953. The Whisper in the Gloom. Harper, 1954 also published as Catch and Kill A Tangled Web. Harper, 1956 also published as Death and Daisy Bland End of Chapter. Harper, 1957. A Penknife in My Heart. Collins, 1958, Harper, 1959. The Widow's Cruise. Harper, 1959. The Worm of Death. Harper, 1961. The Deadly Joker. Collins, 1963. The Sad Variety. Harper, 1964. The Morning after Death. Collins, 1966. The Nicholas Blake Omnibus.

Collins, 1966. The Private Wound. Harper, 1968. Non-fiction A Hope for Poetry (criticism). Basil Blackwell, 1934 reprinted with a postscript, Folcroft, 1969. Revolution in Writing (commentary). Hogarth, 1935. We're Not Going to Do Nothing (commentary). Left Review, 1936. Imagination and Thinking (with L.S. Stebbing). Life and Leisure, 1936. The Poetic Image (criticism). Oxford University Press, 1947. Enjoying Poetry. Cambridge University Press for National Book League, 1947. The Colloquial Element in English Poetry (criticism). Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1947. The Poet's Task (criticism). Clarendon Press, 1951. The Grand Manner (criticism), University of Nottingham, 1952. The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy (criticism).

Oxford University Press, 1953; Folcroft, 1970. Christmas Eve. Faber, 1954. Notable Images of Virtue: Emily Bronte, George Meredith, W. B. Yeats. Ryerson, 1954. The Poet's Way of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 1957. The Buried Day (autobiography). Harper, 1960. The Lyric Impulse (Charles Eliot Norton lectures). Harvard University Press, 1965. Thomas Hardy (with R.A. Scott-James) (criticism). Longman, 1965. A Need for Poetry? University of Hull, 1968. On Translating Poetry: A lecture. Abbey Press, 1970. Going My Way. [London], 1970. Juvenile Edit Dick Willoughby (fiction). Basil Blackwell, 1933; Random House, 1938. Poetry for You: A book for boys and girls on the enjoyment of poetry.

Basil Blackwell, 1944; New York: Oxford University Press, 1947. The Otterbury Incident (adaptation of the French film Nous le gosses, released in England as Us Kids). Putnam, 1948; reissued, 1963. Translated Virgil , Georgics. London: Cape, 1940. Paul Valery, Le Cimetiere marin. Secker & Warburg, 1947. Virgil, Aeneid. Oxford University Press, 1952; Doubleday Anchor, 1953. Virgil, Eclogues. London: Cape, 1963. Virgil, The Eclogues and Georgics. Doubleday Anchor, 1964 published in UK as The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. Oxford University Press, 1966. Erzsi Gazdas, The Tomtit in the Rain: Traditional Hungarian rhymes (With Matyas Sarkozi). London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. Edited Oxford Poetry (with W.H. Auden ).

Oxford, UK: Blackwell , 1927-32. The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the cultural cevolution. Muller, 1937; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft, 1972. Ralph Fox: Writer in Arms (with John Lehmann, T.A. Jackson Fox, and Ralph Winston). International Publishers, 1937. Anatomy of Oxford: An anthology (with Charles Fenby). Cape, 1938. An Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920-1940 (also published as A New Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920-1940) (with L.A.G. Strong) Methuen, 1941. The Echoing Green: An Anthology of Verse (3 volumes). Basil Blackwell, 1941-1943.. Orion(With others) Nicholson & Watson, Volume II, 1945, Volume III, 1946. Francis T. Palgrave , The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language.

Collins, 1954. The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry, 1915-1955 (edited with John Lehmann ). Chatto & Windus, 1956. Charles Dickens , The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Collins, 1956. New Poems 1957 (with Kathleen Nott and Thomas Blackburn). M. Joseph, 1957. Wilfred Owen , Collected Poems (amended edition; editor and author of introduction and notes). New Directions, 1954. English Lyric Poems, 1500-1900. Appleton, 1961 published in England as A Book of English Lyrics. Chatto & Windus, 1961. Edmund Charles Blunden , The Midnight Skaters: Poems for Young Readers (editor and author of introduction). Bodley Head, 1968. The Poems of Robert Browning . Cambridge, UK: Limited Editions Club, 1969; Heritage Press, 1971. A Choice of Keats's Verse. Faber, 1971.

Dean denies Poet Laureate his plaque in the Abbey - Telegraph Dean denies Poet Laureate his plaque in the Abbey BY Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent 12:01AM GMT 02 Feb 2003 The Dean of Westminster has prompted a furious row by refusing to display a commemorative plaque to Cecil Day-Lewis, the former Poet Laureate, in Poet's Corner. The Very Rev Wesley Carr has rebuffed efforts to commemorate Day-Lewis - the father of the Oscar-winning actor Daniel - despite the poet's celebrated talks from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey from the 1930s. A petition submitted by the Royal Society of Literature and signed by more than 50 writers including Seamus Heaney, A.S. Byatt, P.D. James, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Melvyn Bragg has failed to alter the dean's position on Day-Lewis. Many writers are also incensed at Dr Carr's treatment of Jill Day-Lewis, the writer's widow, after the dean asked her for references to support the claim for a plaque and questioned her husband's contribution to literature.

In a letter to Mrs Day-Lewis, Dr Carr wrote: "There seems to be a view around that anyone who is Poet Laureate is automatically memorialised in the Abbey. That has not been the case and I cannot see it becoming the situation, either. Related Articles Multi-faith coronation plea 18 Sep 2002 "We have to take a very strict view of the literary contribution of the candidate concerned. People try to recommend candidates not for specific reasons but for a whole range of reasons that one might call general goodness and worthiness." Mrs Day-Lewis said that the tone of the letter was deeply hurtful. "I found that most upsetting," she said. "My husband had been professor of poetry at Oxford, Clark lecturer at Cambridge, Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard, Compton lecturer at Hull and chairman of the Arts Council's literature panel. "He did an enormous amount to help writers as well as helping the Abbey itself, where he gave many readings and talks. They even gave him a silver ashtray as a thank you present for all he had done there." She added: "He was such a modest man, and I waited until 25 years after his death before approaching the Abbey.

I have no idea why they don't want him commemorated there as he did a great deal of public service and gave up so much of his time to help writers. It seems arbitrary. The dean and chapter are completely autocratic - they are a law unto themselves." Day-Lewis, who preferred to be called "C" because he did not like the name Cecil, was one of a close corpus of poets that came to prominence during the 1930s which included W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice. He became a familiar voice on the radio thanks to the hundreds of broadcasts he gave about poetry for the BBC and was made Poet Laureate in 1968. He died four years later aged 68. He was also famous for the detective stories he wrote under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. Both John Masefield and John Betjeman, respectively Day-Lewis's predecessor and successor as Poet Laureate, are commemorated in Westminster Abbey.

Andrew Motion, the present Poet Laureate, said: "Dr Wesley Carr is no doubt good at his job and I don't think anybody would expect him to be a super literary critic, but Poet's Corner is important and he should think carefully about who he rejects from it. "C. Day-Lewis was extremely famous in his day and wrote some beautiful love poems. He was also interesting as a translator and novelist and I think considerable credit ought to be shown towards him for his general contribution as a man of letters." Ben Okri, the Booker Prize-winning author who is campaigning for more streets in Britain to be named after modern writers, also denounced the dean's decision, which follows a ruling by English Heritage not to put up a blue plaque on the former home of V. S. Pritchett, the writer. "I feel very strongly that we neglect our writers at our peril," Mr Okri said. "These plaques are visible signs of what society respects and what draws succeeding generations to us. What people see in their environment creates a quality of respect and increases awareness of a writer's work." A spokesman for the Dean of Westminster said: "Whatever we do, we don't discuss our decisions.

We consult very widely but we cannot divulge how we arrived at our decision about C. Day-Lewis because it is confidential. Many people have many views." Mrs Day-Lewis said that her son Daniel would not comment at the moment, but added: "I feel sure he would come from wherever he is in the world if only they put this memorial in place." The row is particularly embarrassing as the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court and the Abbey is a "Royal Peculiar", which comes under the direct jurisdiction of the Queen. The Blagger's Guide To: Cecil Day-Lewis | The Independent The Blagger's Guide To: Cecil Day-Lewis The Poet Laureate, political activist and Casanova Sunday 4 November 2012 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture The papers of the former poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis have been donated to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The stash of some 54 boxes, containing essays, drafts of poems and letters from many eminent 20th-century figures, were presented to the university on Tuesday by his children, the actor Daniel and the cookery writer Tamasin.

"If the manuscripts had ended up outside the country, it would have saddened us all as a family, as the poets who became papa's lifelong friends and peers all met up at Oxford as undergraduates," they said. Day-Lewis was born in Ireland in 1904, the son of an Anglican vicar. The family moved to England the following year, but he would always consider himself Anglo-Irish, and Ireland is a recurring theme in his poems. After attending Sherborne School (with fellow Ireland-born poet Louis MacNeice), he read classics at Oxford, where he became a close friend of WH Auden, helping him to edit the 1927 edition of the literary magazine Oxford Poetry. With Stephen Spender, they would become known as the Thirties Poets, a group of politicised left-wing writers; rival poet Roy Campbell lumped them all together as MacSpaunday. Day-Lewis was a member of the Communist Party for three years and was the most politically active of the group. In 1928, he married Constance Mary King, the daughter of a teacher at his old school. He had two children with her and worked as a schoolmaster.

Tall and handsome, he was much sought after, and, during the 1940s, had an affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. Torn between two women, he agonised over his double life in his poetry. In 1951, his first marriage dissolved, and he married the actress Jill Balcon, by whom he had Daniel and Tamasin. In 1935, he wrote a crime novel under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, to top up his income. It proved a hit, and he went on to write a further 19, most of them starring his gentleman detective, Nigel Strangeways. After the war, when he worked for the Ministry of Information, he was asked to deliver the Clark lectures at Cambridge. In one, he pondered whether an advert for shoes qualified as poetic imagery: "Midsummer flooding the fields with flowers! Oh the bliss of the sun-filled hours when foot-forgotten in Panda shoe, you dream along under cloudless blue!" He concluded it didn't, as it had "no emotion, no passion". From 1951, he taught poetry at Oxford; then, in 1962, moved to Harvard.

In 1968, upon the death of John Masefield, he was appointed Poet Laureate, but he held the post for only four years. In 1972, he died of pancreatic cancer while staying with Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard at their home in Hertfordshire. She had also been his lover, once saying, "I would defy any woman to resist him." Unusually, Day-Lewis is not commemorated in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey, an honour typically bestowed on the Poet Laureate. The reason is not clear, but abbey authorities at the time were thought to have disapproved of his highly political writings from the 1930s. Instead, he is buried in Stinsford, in the same churchyard as Thomas Hardy, whom he asked to lie as close as possible. More about: Ian Hamilton · Diary: Poets Laureate · LRB 7 January 1999 Diary Ian Hamilton When Cecil Day Lewis was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, he got – within days of the good news – a letter from his bank manager.

‘The whole Midland,’ it said, ‘rejoices with you.’ And this, it might be felt, comes close to summing up what’s wrong with being Poet Laureate. Since banks began, poets have received many letters from bank managers but few have been at all like Cecil’s. To send the Midland into raptures of this kind, a fellow would surely need to have done something rather seriously unpoetic. Day Lewis, though, was thrilled to have so thrilled his money-minders. And he was thrilled, too, by the antiquated perks that went with his new job: the ‘butt of sack’ and all the rest of it. At the same time, he knew that his butt would have to be worked for. His first poem as Laureate, called ‘Now and Then’, appeared on the front page of the Daily Mail and was promoted as part of that paper’s ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign. Of ‘Now and Then’, Bernard Levin rather tastelessly observed, years later, that it ‘made many regret their impulsive rejoicing at the death of his predecessor’.

Even Day Lewis’s admiring editor and close friend, Ian Parsons, when he was putting together a Collected Poems, shrank from reprinting the poet’s Laureate offerings. He called these works ‘banal when they were not embarrassingly disingenuous’. And this, over the centuries, has been the way of things with Laureates. So far, there have been about twenty of them, and – although there is still pleasure to be had from quiz questions like ‘what do Henry Pye and Laurence Eusden have in common?’ – the whole thing is now generally agreed to be a joke. Or is it? Sometimes I am not so sure. The other day, for instance, I was contacted by a highly serious poet friend who was, he said, thinking of starting up some kind of campaign to head off PL challenges from light versifiers and streetwise demi-minstrels. He seemed to think that the choice of Laureate would send out important signals to do with the prestige of the contemporary poet, and of poetry in general. Maybe he was joking. I think not, though.

When I replied that, for all I cared, they could give the thing to Snoop Doggy Dogg, or even to Snoop’s dogg, should he possess one, my friend was not wholly amused. It seems significant, too, that none of the poets touted in the papers as possibles to fill the current vacancy has said that he or she won’t take the post, should it be offered. Evidently the Laureateship is still thought of by some poets as a plum. One recalls, with condescension, the anguish of Tennyson in 1843 when he was passed over for the job. He needed the money, it was said – the publicity, the extra sales. But he also had a dark hunger for the prize itself. Nowadays the money benefits are unlikely to add up to much, and the prestige is pretty much in tatters. The dark hunger, though, seems to persist. But why, oh why? Maybe poets want to be Laureates because they secretly fear that they’ve already made the most of whatever gifts they started out with. Since nobody expects a PL to be any good, why not accept the job and let it take the blame for your next book?

Cecil Day Lewis’s predecessor as Laureate was John Masefield, who held the post for nearly forty years without seeming to know, or greatly care, what was required of him. Masefield was in place for so long that, by the time he died, most people had forgotten that we had a Poet Laureate. Every so often, he used to remind us by sending off some resolutely dreadful verses to the Times. He was always careful, though, to enclose a stamped, addressed envelope, just in case. Some of his submissions, the story went, were sent back by return of post, with a rejection slip. Day Lewis, it was predicted at the time of his appointment, would be much more on the ball. After all, had he not been limbering up for this honour for some years, with his clubs and his committees and his suave, actorly ‘recitals’ of gems from our poetic heritage? At my school in the Fifties, a regular item on the assembly song-sheet was a turgidly patriotic hymn with words, I was confused to note, by C.

Day Lewis: a poet who, according to my English teacher, was actually the rear end of MacSpaunday, and the only one of ‘that lot’ who’d been an authentically red Red. By 1968, Day Lewis was a cleaned-up act, entirely tame, and more than qualified to seize those laurels. Indeed, it would have been a callous decision, I recall thinking at the time, not to have chosen him. The appointment of Ted Hughes in 1984 was rather different. For one thing, he took over from cuddly John Betjeman, a poet who – with all his charm – was not too strong on Laureate-style gravitas. With Betjeman, we felt and hoped, there was always the possibility of mischief. Also, Hughes was known to be the Sovereign’s second choice, a useful consideration to be kept in mind should things go wrong. Philip Larkin had already given the honour a (possibly reluctant) thumbs-down: he was very ill. If there were question marks about Ted Hughes, they would have been to do with his reputation as a rebarbative cave-dwelling type, and as a connoisseur of bestial unpleasantness.

All in all, it was hard to imagine him getting worked up about a fleet of corgis. And there was perhaps discussion also of his long-ago marriage to an unstable American (although by 1984, Hughes had weathered the worst attacks on him by feminist Plathologists). On the plus side: Hughes did write books for children and one of his best-known poems was about a fox, so – who could tell? – he might turn out to be another Masefield. For my part, I was mildly surprised at first that Hughes had accepted the position. Although I knew him to be some what more literary-worldly than he liked to seem, the drift of his self-presentation had always been to stand craggily aloof from metropolitan book-circuses. Also his most recent Moortown poems had impressively traversed the dead-end he seemed to have run into with the blood-drenched Crow. He appeared to have found a new line for his work, part narrative, part diary-entry, and to have discovered, too, a more coherent speaking voice, a human voice.

( Looking back, we can easily surmise that several of the poems in Birthday Letters were composed around this time: Hughes had just finished editing Plath’s journals, in which she gave her version of certain key episodes in their courtship and marriage.) It soon became clear, though, why Hughes wanted to be Poet Laureate. As he perceived them, the Royals were not the Royals as rendered by Spitting Image and the Sun; not for him your Fergies and your Di’s. In his sub-Shakespearean scheme of things, ancient notions of kingship were still coursing in the nation’s veins, or should be. Disregarding tabloid debunkery, he would make it his business to assimilate a conceptualised Monarch into his personal blueprint for tribal renovation. In short, he would poeticise the Windsors. It was easy enough to smile at such an enterprise but it was also hard not to be touched by Hughes’s perception of what a true Laureate might be: a kind of patriotic bard magician whose task was to reconnect the English to their primal selves. Why shouldn’t the Royals – even unto the Fergies and the Di’s – be similarly reconnected?

By the sheer force of his impassioned deference, a genuine Laureate might restore the land’s rulers to – well, to the land. And by the land Hughes did not mean Sandringham and Balmoral, although we understand that he liked visiting such places. He had in mind certain remote areas of South Devon and North Yorkshire, where the land is always freezing and rainswept and where the sun, should it appear, is ‘like a torn-out eye’. In Hughes’s worldview, so far as we can piece it together from his prose, Nature is always credited with deep health-giving powers: it’s good for the instincts, good for the imagination and good for our animal self-knowledge, should we want that too. In his most effective verses, though, Nature is mostly seen as hostile. It may be good for us but it wants nothing from us in return, beyond our trembling capitulation. Caught in Nature’s war-zones, even the most elemental humans – even the poet Hughes himself – come across as wimpishly inept, riddled with feebleness and hesitation. And this, the poet seems to think, is how it should be, how it really is.

One of the instincts we have lost over the centuries is our fear of the barbaric, a fear that used to shade into the reverential. Regenerate the fear and you will regenerate the reverence. Ted Hughes poems, it often seemed, were intended to re-frighten us. And so they did, and do, from time to time – especially the early ones, in which Hughes flaunted his descriptive powers as if to betoken some rare truce that he had managed to negotiate with the forces of unreason. His descriptions were actually inscriptions. No pig you’d ever seen looked quite as scary as a Ted Hughes pig. And this applied also to his sheep and cows. Rereading Moortown – his best book, I would say, since Lupercal – I was drawn to wonder how (in farmer’s terms) Hughes rated as a farmer. Silly question, I suppose, but hard to shake off once you’ve thought of it. And what did he get up to when he wasn’t contending with the elements? There has been talk about black magic, or some such. Do we believe it? Do we care? Or, to get back to those Royals, did Hughes really go on fishing trips with the Queen Mother?

And if so, what did they catch: a tiddler or a pike? There is a great deal about Hughes that we don’t know. His obituaries, though gushingly fulsome on the verse and on his shamanish ‘persona’, were actually quite thin on factual background. On the whole, they repeated what little Hughes had himself vouchsafed and then added a few scrawny anecdotes. He was of course a fierce opponent of biography. I remember a review he wrote of a biography of Dylan Thomas: who else, I wondered, could write about Thomas and scarcely mention drink and money? You had to admire it in a way but it was also pretty annoying: who do these incantators think they are? But then Hughes did have his special reasons for despising the dogs and hyenas, as he called them, of Life-writing. Curiosity about Hughes has been inseparable from curiosity about his marriage to Sylvia Plath. He knew this and at times, it must have hurt. Did he find it at all depressing that his most successful book of verse turned out to be the one in which he finally ‘spoke out’ about his love affair with Plath?

There are some fine things in Birthday Letters, but few can deny that the chief impact of the book was biographical – and not biographical re Hughes. Altogether, though, one rather shudders at the prospect of a Ted Hughes Life. When Philip Larkin died, there was a period of seeming desolation but it was soon followed by an enthusiastic surge of reappraisal when it turned out, from the Life and the Letters, that this most delicately sorrowing of poets had in his drab daily life been a near-champion of coarseness. Can Hughes avoid some similar comeuppance? It seems unlikely. Indeed, with him perhaps the demystification will be extra-gleeful. Larkin, after all, never pretended to be touched with any purifying flame. Nor, to be fair, did Hughes pretend to be a ‘god of granite who could shatter stones with plain words’, which is what the Independent called him a couple of days after he died.

Question: Who was the predecessor of Cecil Day Lewis as Poet Laureate?
Answer: John Masefield